Feierliche Eröffnung 2024

Esther Kinsky
Opening Speech

The writer and translator Esther Kinsky, born in Engelskirchen in 1956 and raised in the Rhineland, has been awarded numerous awards for her extensive literary work, which includes poetry, essays, and narrative prose. She is also an accomplished translator for Polish, Russian, and English. In 2022, she received the prestigious Kleist Prize. Kinsky’s works impress with their stylistic brilliance, thematic diversity, and stubborn originality. She is a truly European writer: her books are set in the Hungarian province ("Banatsko", 2011), on the outskirts of East London ("Am Fluss", 2014), on a small archipelago off the west coast of Scotland ("Schiefern", 2020), or in Friuli, Italy ("Hain: Geländeroman", 2018, awarded with the Leipzig Book Fair Prize in 2020; "Rombo", 2022).

In her texts, Kinsky travels to unknown, unnoticed peripheries. She has dedicated herself to the existential, human experience of exploring and overcoming the foreign. Seeing, recognizing, and naming a strange world in natural-historical, geological, geographical, cultural, and historical-political contexts is the central theme of her oeuvre. Kinsky's novels and poems place people in a relationship with "disturbed terrain" ("Störungen", 2023), an area that gradually reverts to nature after a phase of intensive use and exploitation by humans. She eloquently examines metaphorical fields of disturbance as well: historical burdens, frictions of nature and culture, the tension between extractivism and reconquest. Her writing is a school of perception in its own right. Her latest book "Weiter Sehen", a love letter to the cinema as a space that expands our point of view, asks how it is possible to "see further" and reach an understanding when the place of shared experience, the cinema, has been dismantled in favor of a privatized life and experience. This year, Esther Kinsky will give the opening speech of the Ruhrfestspiele.

Tip: The speech will be recorded. We will publish the video recording shortly after the here.

The Pulse
Gravity & Other Myths

Director: Darcy Grant
Composer: Ekrem Eli Phoenix
Lighting & Set Designer: Geoff Cobham
in co-operation with the women's concert choir of CHORAKADEMIE at Konzerthaus Dortmund e. V.

German Premiere

The australian company that has conquered the world, brings together all three of its core ensembles plus a choir of 24 voices. The Pulse is the work of scale that we’ve been longing for. The Helpmann award-winning creative team responsible for Out of Chaos – director Darcy Grant, designer Geoff Cobham and composer Ekrem Eli Phoenix – reunite to extend and amplify the signature spirit of this unique company: visceral, poetic, heart-stopping feats… Dispatched by your best mates.

Epic passages of seemingly impossible levels of cooperation and humanity, repeat, stretch, blossom and decay alluding to forces much greater than ourselves.

Watch as a mountain of bodies crumbles into an ocean of voice. Towering human structures move with precision through a pulsing web. Cobham’s sentient lighting design, combined with Grant's inspired crowd management and Phoenix's driving score, create an intricate, organic synchronicity of human movement and sound – all to the beat of your own pounding pulse!

It’s the heart-starter we all need.